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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The bell rings insistently...I open the door. Outside in the dark only illuminated by the porch light stands a sinister group. Oh, brother...I forgot it was Halloween. A tall girl in a torn white garment ,her hair disheveled....she looks mad as a hatter. A bend over youth with a malevolent grin obviously dressed as some kind of jester. A figure all in black with a dress covered with stars and a gimlet stare . And who is that child covered with blood? ....Carrie? No....now I get it...hey kid put down that axe. Please...no tricks from this dangerous group ...and I haven't prepared any of the usual treats . So for them (and you) instead of candy corn, Hershey kisses and some home baked chocolate chip cookies here is a tray full of Youtube Halloween goodies . Enjoy....and watch out for razor blades in the apples....remember Lizzie got off and is still out there somewhere

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

We'll be running a series of "Lizzie Bordon Factoids" over the next weeks as we get ready for her scary and eagerly awaited in-person arrival at the Castle on November 20th .

Here's # 1 "The Elegance and Mystery of Chronological Congruence "

Is it just coincidence or some greater cosmic manifestation that James M Barrie, Anton Chekov, Gustav Mahler , Grandma Moses and Lizzie Borden were all born in 1860.

To say nothing of the possibly more apt Annie Oakley (both she and Lizzie were, after all , good with weapons) and the decisively less apt Juliette Low (founder of the Girl Scouts - although in some ways Lizzie appeared as a kind of ideal Girl Scout type - kind to animals, charity work, churchgoer etc )

Low also died the same year as Lizzie ...and Annie the year before And what of the fact that Isadora Duncan died in year of Lizzie"s death - 1927

And who was born that year? Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt , Gina Lollobrigida, Patty Page and Caesar Chavez

Today is the first rehearsal for BLO's production of LIZZIE BORDEN - a newly commissioned one act version of Jack Beeson's dramatic opera that in its original three act version enjoyed great success at New York City Opera and at Glimmerglass. With the newly realized chamber orchestration that reveals anew the inherent power of the score, performed in the appropriately Gothic ambiance of the Castle and directed by one of America's boldest and incisive directors, Christopher Alden, this promises to be crucial and unmissable part of BLO's season. To celebrate this important launching , we today start features on Facebook and Twitter. We have been extremely fortunate to engage an intriguing guest to help us here. The volatile , misunderstood heroine (or murderess ?) Lizzie herself a Facebook page - a forum to present her uncensored, possibly revelatory , perhaps controversial thoughts and musings - and a place where you can interact (if you dare) with this most notorious, ambiguous and fascinating celebrity .

Friday, October 25, 2013

I go up to Boston next week to rehearse and then present BLO's Signature Series "Lizzie Borden took an axe" at the Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday November 3 . This is the newest entry in a series that I have been creating over the past 4 years that deals with each of our operas in the repertory for that season but in a varied and wide range of contexts. Rather than a direct analysis of the music or a discussion of BLO's specific approach we explore how ideas or characters derived from the opera might stretch out into novels, poetry, painting,cinema, history, popular culture. Also rather than a lecture, we create mini -dramas, theater pieces of about an hour in length. We are lucky to be able to use the elegant and comfortable Remis auditorium at the MFA. For our LIZZIE program I am creating a collage as it were of various views of the fascinatingly complex Lizzie herself, newspaper accounts of the murders and excerpts from the sensational trial that transfixed the country. Mixed in with this will be the compelling music from Jack Beeson's opera we will be presenting in the unique atmosphere of the Castle opening November 20 (check out our Website for details ). We welcome to the Sunday afternoon event the well known Boston actress Celeste Oliva and the dynamic Heather Johnson who sings the title role with BLO . Together they will take us into the tortured, ambiguous ( still we ask...did she do it...or not?) and highly dramatic excitement of the world of Lizzie Borden . Join us John Conklin

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

The congruences of chronology have always fascinated me. Coincidence or cosmic planning ? But surely the overlapping birthdates of both Verdi and Wagner in 1813 must show some divine organization. When one adds the birth of Georg Buchner (German playwright of WOYZECK source of Berg's opera ) the situation grows complex - and furthermore it was the year of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and L'ITALIANA IN ALGERI and the year of Kierkegaard's deathMoving on 100 years we can add Benjamin Britten to our anniversary celebrations. But we must also include the unlikely duo of birthday boys Richard Nixon and Albert Camus...and this was the year of PYGMALION, DEATH IN VENICE and THE RITE OF SPRING. How will we look back on 2013?We've missed the celebration of the actual birthday by a week or so but no matter...here are a few of my choice Verdiana Youtube moments

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

I 'm glad to be back on the BLO Blog after a bit of time away -
traveling, reading, listening, looking . I hope that with due diligence I'll be
able to post every Wednesday with items operatic and musical....funny
....serious... unusual....stimulating. A couple of weeks ago I attended a quite
fascinating program at the MFA presented by BLO's Signature Series entitled
""The Magic Flute Variations" where among many other rarely
performed works all related to FLUTE (including excerpts from
Schikaneder's sequel DAS LABYRINTH and a few bits from
Goethe's version of the story ) we heard the relatively more
familiar Beethoven Variations on Papageno's aria "Ein Madchen". So
here are some other takes by various composers on the irresistible music
from Mozart's opera (The BLO production of FLUTE has only a few more
performances this week. Catch it if you can)

Two more sets of FLUTE explorations by two Spanish virtuosos and
composers: guitarist Fernando Sor (1778 -1839) and the world
famous - in his time more or less known the Liszt of the
violin- Pablo de Saraste (1844- 1908)

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Magda
Romanska, BLO Dramaturg and Associate Professor of Dramaturgy at Emerson
College, talks to Professor Neal Zaslaw about Mozart’s The
Magic Flute. Prof. Zaslaw is a
world-renowned musicologist and the leading expert on Mozart. Between 1978 and
1982 he supervised recordings of all of Mozart’s symphonies by Jaap Schroeder,
Christopher Hogwood, and the Academy of Ancient Music. Time magazine called the results “one of the most
important projects in the history of recorded sound.” A decade later Professor
Zaslaw was dubbed “Mr. Mozart” by the New York Times for organizing the 1991–92 Mozart Bicentennial at Lincoln Center, which
staged performances of all of Mozart’s works.

MR: The Magic Flute libretto has undergone many
rewrites and re-interpretations. Can you tell us a little bit about the history
of some of these rewrites?

NZ: The Magic
Flute’s dialogue is never delivered uncut from the stage or on audio or
video recordings. It can be found whole only in earnest scholarly publications.
Between 1793 and 1798 The Magic Flute
was staged in more than sixty central European cities, from Aachen to Saint
Petersburg, from London to Zagreb. In none of these productions, the librettos
of which I’ve been able to examine, was Schikaneder’s text left unaltered: the
dialogue was always cut and revised, and even the texts that Mozart set were
sometimes changed. As early as 1794 the play was systematically reworked by
Christian August Vulpius for Goethe’s theater in Weimar. Just as interesting is
the fact that following Mozart’s death some five weeks after the première of The Magic Flute, and probably even
before that, Schikaneder himself was altering the text. Schikaneder revived the
show on and off over some two decades, during which time he felt free to
'update' the libretto. You have to remember, at that time, the wealthy would go
to the theatre every night, often to see the same show.
They knew the most popular productions by heart and so they would recognize
each alteration to the text. Those who have dealt with the 18th-century opera
and operetta writ large know that such practices were the norm. Stage works
were commonly revised for each new production, to update them and to deal with
local musical and theatrical resources, local audience tastes, reigning
ideologies, and the quirks of patrons.

MR:
Our new adaptation focuses on the story of self-discovery: the hero’s quest for
enlightenment and autonomy. It is an allegorical representation of a young
man’s process of growing up, of becoming a man. There is a personal story about
Mozart’s own life that suggests that The
Magic Flute might be a parable of his own life story. Can you tell us about
it?

NZ: Mozart’s family collected everything having to
do with his childhood, every scrap of paper, diaries, literally everything. One
of the reasons was that Mozart’s father, Leopold, intended to write a book
about Mozart’s childhood, in which he was planning to portray himself as the
wise man who raised a perfect child. The book never was written, because at the
age of twenty-four Mozart ran away from home. It’s not that he didn’t love his
father, but his father was such a powerful figure in his life that he wasn’t
able to establish his own identity without gaining independence from his father.
The model for the intended book wasChristian Gellert’s
epistolary book, Geistliche Oden und Lieder
(1758), a compilation of letters from a wise father to his son. That book
inspired Leopold to write his own.

MR:
Can we say that it was meant to be an earliest form of Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, chronicling
the moral, emotional and psychological growth of the young protagonist? Or,
more specifically,Künstlerroman, a story of an artist’s coming to maturity?

NZ: Yes, it was meant to be such a story of education. There
is a famous letter from Mozart to his wife, in which he describes how he
decided to go to the theatre to see The
Magic Flute to see how it’s doing. He sits in the box of a man who clearly
seems unimpressed. When thestory gets
to the crucial moment at which Tamino is standing in front of temple's three
portals, marked Reason, Wisdom and Nature, Mozart attempts to explain the
scene's underlying meaning, and when the man simply laughs, Mozart calls him a
jackass and leaves the box in a rage. The reason the plot of The Magic Flute seems so inconsistent is
that we see it through Tamino’s eyes, and the world for him is inconsistent. In
the first act, he sees the world one way, and then, things change, and he sees
them the other way. The only scene for which we have a sketch is that scene
with Tamino standing in front of the doors. It means that Mozart had thought long
and hard about how he was going to do it. It was an important scene.

MR:
Can we say that this moment of Tamino’s choice is the climactic moment of the
story?

NZ: Maybe you are right. Maybe this scene at the end
of the first act is the climactic scene. In the first act, you have to represent
the hero’s confusion and his naïve idealism and inability to figure things out.
In the second act, he becomes enlightened. In Bergman’s film version, the story
is presented as a custody battle between divorced spouses (the Queen of the
Night and Sarastro), with the daughter, Pamina, trapped between them. This is
one of the best adaptations, which captures in light and color the essence of
the story.

MR:
The story is allegorical; that is, it requires the suspension of disbelief for
us to be carried away by it. Different elements have contributed to its
reception. Can you tell us about it?

NZ: Is Magic
Flute a grand opera, a Singspiel, a Hanswurst farce, a fairy tale, a
morality play, a magic show, a Bildungsroman,
a coded political message, Trinitarian symbolism, the Orpheus story retold, or
a Masonic allegory? Because of its complexity and its hybrid nature, The Magic
Flute can support any number of interpretations. It is a fairy tale with a
serious subtext. The music is a whole other element that makes things emotional
and believable, which wouldn’t happen without music. The tension is
melodramatic—you have to suspend disbelief at the terror of trial by water and
fire. Schikaneder’s theatre was equipped with machines for supernatural
effects, such as flying, volcanos, storms, waves, waterfalls, infernos, and
rapid set changes.These effects, these
illusions, apparently could be surprisingly realistic in the dim lighting of
the 18th-century theaters. The curtain never went down between scenes, so the
mutations must have been the equivalent of 'slow fades' in movies.The music is the element that makes things
emotional and 'believable.' The tension is melodramatic—for instance, to experience
it you must not only suspend disbelief, but also identify with the tender young
protagonists, empathetically channeling their terror and courage as they pass
through their trials. The Magic Flute was, and is, a popular
entertainment serving as the sugarcoating on a serious message, but we can
never know precisely what the message was. But even though it made Mozart
angry, his immortal work can also be considered simply a delightful excuse for
an evening of glorious music.